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When He Dined, the Stars Came Out

A 1973 Bastille Day celebration at Craig Claiborne’s home in East Hampton, L.I. Jacques Pépin is third from the left.Credit
Paul Hosefros/The New York Times

ON May 18, 1962, readers of The New York Times woke up to learn that of all the Chinese restaurants in the city, “there is probably none with a finer kitchen” than Tien Tsin, in Harlem. The same article praised four other places to eat, including Gaston, on East 49th Street, which “may qualify as having one of the most inspired French kitchens in town,” and Marchi’s, on East 31st Street, “one of New York’s most unusual North Italian restaurants.”

The author of these judgments was Craig Claiborne, the newspaper’s food editor. He prefaced his article with a short note: “The following is a listing of New York restaurants that are recommended on the basis of varying merits. Such a listing will be published every Friday in The New York Times.”

And that is just what happened, first in what were called the women’s pages (“Food Fashions Family Furnishings”), and then, after 1976, in the Weekend section; by that time, the column was not a listing but a review of one or two restaurants. In 1997, with the invention of the Dining In/Dining Out section, it jumped to Wednesdays, where it still lives.

Some American writers had nibbled at the idea of professional restaurant criticism before this, including Claiborne, who had written one-off reviews of major new restaurants for The Times. But his first “Directory to Dining,” 50 years ago this month, marks the day when the country pulled up a chair and began to chow down. Within a few years, nearly every major newspaper had to have a Craig Claiborne of its own. Reading the critics, eating what they had recommended, and then bragging or complaining about it would become a national pastime.

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Reviews by Craig Claiborne, shown in 1980, made it easier to separate the best restaurants from the ones merely favored by the aristocracy.Credit
Arthur Schatz/Time Life Pictures, via Getty Images

As the current caretaker of the house that Claiborne built, I lack objectivity on this subject. Still, I believe that without professional critics like him and others to point out what was new and delicious, chefs would not be smiling at us from magazine covers, subway ads and billboards. They would not be invited to the White House, except perhaps for job interviews. Claiborne and his successors told Americans that restaurants mattered. That was an eccentric opinion a half-century ago. It’s not anymore.

None of this was obvious in Claiborne’s early directories, which were so compressed that there wasn’t room for much writing. There were typically four or five capsules a week of less than 100 words each, most of which concerned prices, addresses and other data.

Over time, this rather drab creature evolved its characteristic plumage. The capsules got longer, and within a few years Claiborne was writing about two restaurants a week with some depth and verve.

The column’s most easily recognized field mark, the starred ranking, made its debut on May 24, 1963, with a three-star scale. A fourth star, still the newspaper’s top grade, was placed on the top of the tree a year later. The arguments about what it all means have been going on ever since.

Most influential of all were the rules Claiborne set for himself, which became the industry ideal. He was independent of advertising, tried to dine anonymously, and before passing judgment would eat at least two meals (later three) that were paid for by The Times, not the restaurants. Claiborne’s guidelines sent a message that he wasn’t an overprivileged and overfed man about town. He was a critic with a job to do.

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Claude Baills, Seppi Renggli, Craig Claiborne, Janey Renggli and Alain Sailhac, from left, in the kitchen together in Sept. 1982.Credit
Edward Hausner/The New York Times

The guidelines also sent a message within the Times’s newsroom that the food department had high standards, too, even if Claiborne’s restaurant directory ran next to tips on polishing silver and photographs of new place mats for sale on the fifth floor of Altman’s.

“He saw himself as a critic on a par with the paper’s critics of books, art, music and drama, and he was determined to bring to his work a rigor and gravity equal to theirs,” writes Thomas McNamee in “The Man Who Changed the Way We Eat” (Free Press, $27), a biography of Claiborne that is being published this month.

If the prose in those early reviews is not always incandescent, a few of them send up bright flares of recognition. Here is Isle of Capri, where “guests dine off bare marble tables.” There is the King Cole Bar, “open only for men at lunch.” Other listings set off pangs of regret for places that didn’t last to see this century: Sweets, Bleeck’s, Trader Vic’s, Kleine Konditorei.

What is most striking, though, are the head-snapping juxtapositions of linen and linoleum. In one column, Claiborne recommended both a Neapolitan pizzeria and the Colony, the hive of society where Sirio Maccioni studied the art of seating arrangements. In another, Claiborne praised the kitchen at La Côte Basque but had more to say about the food at Chock Full o’ Nuts: “There are more than 30 of these first-class establishments in New York. They are neat as a whistle and the sandwiches and pastries are of a high order.”

Readers who questioned whether Claiborne really put such different genres of dining on an equal footing would learn the answer the day he began handing out stars.

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Craig Claiborne, center, and Pierre Franey, left, enjoyed a $4,000 meal in Paris in 1975. The report appeared in a front-page article.Credit
Jack Nisberg/Roger-Viollet

In a basement near Battery Park, Jimmy’s Greek American Restaurant prepared moussaka and braised lamb for lunch customers who served themselves by walking right into the kitchen. Claiborne gave the place two stars.

A few weeks later, he gave his top rating of three stars to Gil Clark’s, a clam bar on the marina in Bay Shore on Long Island, where the main courses came with French fries and a salad. Parking was available for cars and boats.

Decades before it became fashionable to ride the No. 7 train in search of the cuisine of recent immigrants, Claiborne was prowling the streets in search of Filipino, Armenian, Lebanese, Mexican, Hungarian and Czech menus. He alerted readers to the rise of Japanese restaurants and praised Chinese food that was relatively un-Americanized. When Shun Lee Dynasty came along in the mid-1960s with its menu of Sichuan specialties, he gave it three out of four stars.

Not that Claiborne was incapable of snobbery. In a review from 1961, he wrinkled his nose at the wardrobe worn by the owner of a new French restaurant. “It is advice of the kindliest sort to say that the patron of Lutèce would do well to wear a dinner jacket to maintain the atmosphere created by the décor,” he wrote. “A business suit seems inappropriate.”

But such judgments never kept him from sending his readers down to Mott Street for the fried crabs he had just discovered. Claiborne took food seriously no matter who was cooking or eating it. This egalitarianism was a bit of an innovation in American restaurant writing.

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Claiborne was the author of more than 20 books in his long career.

One of the best-known reviewers of the day was Duncan Hines, who, before selling his name to cake mixes, compiled a traveler’s guide to restaurants across the country. While Hines appreciated the virtues of old-fashioned home cooking, he seemed far more interested in a restaurant’s sanitary conditions than in its ability to turn out delicious sesame noodles.

Mining a richer vein of gastronomy was Lucius Beebe, a dashing figure who doted on his mink-lined coats and doeskin gloves. In Gourmet and The New York Herald Tribune, he celebrated restaurants like the Colony, the Stork Club and “21,” where cafe society gathered to gaze at its own reflection.

If the cooking was enjoyable, Beebe certainly enjoyed it. But in his universe, the worth of a restaurant was determined more by the social status of its customers than the skill of its chef.

Claiborne observed everything when he was reviewing, but ultimately he judged restaurants by what came out of the kitchen. As this idea caught on, it became harder to confuse the country’s best restaurants with the ones that were merely favored by the aristocracy. A different hierarchy in dining, ordered by creativity and excellence in cuisine, was slowly taking shape under the guidance of a new aristocracy: an aristocracy of taste. Today, we call members of this aristocracy “foodies.”

“I think he is responsible for the power that reviewers, and even chefs and food TV and food, have in America,” Mitchell Davis, executive vice president of the James Beard Foundation, said in an interview. Mr. Davis wrote his doctoral dissertation on restaurant reviews in New York and found, somewhat to his surprise, that nearly every thread of research he followed led back to Claiborne, who died in 2000. “He created the model of what it meant to be a foodie.”

Claiborne’s reviews were just one part of that model. He wrote about changing tastes in the White House kitchen, stood by the stove with home cooks who showed him how to prepare tortillas, and reported on the rise of nouvelle cuisine in France. He traveled, most famously to Paris for a $4,000 dinner that he wrote up on the front page, but to more far-flung locales, too.

“I think people were sort of astonished when he did things like he went to Vietnam during the war and sat there within the sound of gunfire, and discovered things like shrimp on a stick,” said Mr. McNamee, Claiborne’s biographer. “He was able to go to Alaska and eat blubber and moose liver and write about it in this strange trance. He seems to take everything in stride. I think this sort of nervelessness helped him bring people around to just trying anything.”

If every meal could be critiqued, even a doughnut at the counter of Chock Full o’ Nuts, then everybody could be a critic. Followed far enough, this road leads to Yelp. But it also leads to thousands of Americans treating each meal not as mere nourishment, and not as a reinforcement of social status, but as a chance to taste something new and wonderful.

Influential as he became, Claiborne seemed not to enjoy his power, or much else about the job. “At times I didn’t give a damn if all the restaurants in Manhattan were shoved into the East River and perished,” he wrote in his memoir. “Toward the end of my days as restaurant critic, I found myself increasingly indulging in drink, the better to endure another evening of dining out.”

His frustration was one reason he quit The Times in the early ’70s. When he returned as food editor in 1974, he and the newspaper agreed that he would not review restaurants.

By then, he didn’t need to. He had already shown everybody how it was done.

A version of this news analysis appears in print on May 9, 2012, on page D1 of the New York edition with the headline: When He Dined, the Stars Came Out. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe